January 31, 2026
Identity theft, but make it browser
History of the browser user-agent string (2008)
From 'Mozilla' cosplay to iPhone imposters, the internet’s been catfished by browsers
TLDR: Browsers have long faked their identities to get nicer web pages, and the crowd’s reliving the chaos—especially the mobile era where everyone pretended to be iPhone, with WAP as the awkward prequel. Fans split between “necessary disguise” and “we’re stuck with nonsense forever,” proving legacy matters.
The community is giggling and groaning at this epic, Bible-style saga of the browser “user-agent string”—basically the little ID line your browser sends to websites to say “hey, it’s me.” The big mood: browsers have been catfishing the web since the 90s, and everyone’s in on the joke.
Readers cheer the retelling of how Internet Explorer pretended to be Netscape to get the “good pages,” then Firefox, Safari, and Chrome piled on with their own disguises. Opera even let users pick their costume. The hot take? This wasn’t genius—it was browser cosplay forced by websites doing “sniffing” (trying to guess your browser) and rewarding only the cool kids. One nostalgic voice points out the missing sequel: the iPhone era, when every mobile browser faked being iPhone just to get decent design. Older readers whisper “remember WAP?”, the throwback phone web that felt like paging through a receipt.
Jokes fly: “fake mustache internet,” “everyone’s Mozilla inside,” and memes of browsers wearing trench coats. The spicy debate is whether these lies were necessary or if they left us with today’s absurd, unreadable user-agent strings that still say “Mozilla” even when they’re not. Verdict from the crowd: hilarious history, messy legacy, peak internet chaos.
Key Points
- •Early browsers like NCSA Mosaic used straightforward UA strings (e.g., NCSA_Mosaic/2.0), while Netscape identified as Mozilla/1.0 and introduced HTML frames.
- •Websites used user-agent sniffing to serve frames and features only to recognized browsers, prompting compatibility issues for others.
- •Microsoft’s Internet Explorer adopted Mozilla-compatible UA strings (e.g., Mozilla/1.22 … MSIE 2.0) to access frame-enabled content and was bundled with Windows.
- •Mozilla created the Gecko engine; Firefox and other Gecko-based browsers adopted Mozilla/5.0 … Gecko UA formats, a pattern echoed by Camino and SeaMonkey.
- •KHTML-based browsers (Konqueror, Safari/WebKit) and Opera used UA wording or selectable impersonation to gain compatibility; Chrome (WebKit) initially mimicked Safari’s UA.